Compy
by GingerFloof26
Summary: A few years after the events of Portal 2, survivors of the Combine invasion retrieve stolen technology from the Borealis and use it to exile GLaDOS to an alternate universe. She takes on the alias 'Compy' and seeks out the one person who still believes in her: a girl named Melody. But can Compy learn to live as a normal human being? Can she put her past behind her and embrace God?
1. Chapter 1

**A.N.: Headcanons used in this chapter are from Tumblr user madamerenard via #GLaDOS headcanons. The human version of GLaDOS used here is roughly based off of a combination of Tumblr user Twinklepowderysnow's android and human versions of GLaDOS. Go check out her art, it is phenomenal!**

I was walking through University Mall after another appointment with my psychiatrist, affectionately known to my friends as "Dr. Tinycat" as per the icanhascheeseburger meme. It had been very gratifying to report to him that at long last, my medication was doing what it was supposed to do and my psychosis was eradicated. It had been a lifelong struggle to overcome "The Voices" in my head that had taken on lives of their own, usually stemming from video games or books I had read. Not any more. Now it was time to take charge of my life and face reality head on...

I turned the corner that would take me toward the food court when a woman with white hair cut in a stylish bob with a shade of lipstick bordering on black nearly crashed into me. She wore heels, shades, slacks, and a peacoat.. Apologising courteously, I smiled and ducked out of the way when the woman suddenly clutched at my arm in a panic.

My calm demeanor was shaken a bit. "Can I help you?" I asked, eyeing the woman nervously. To tell the truth, she looked uncommonly like...but that was ridiculous.

"Yes...where are you going?"

"To the transit station. Do you need help finding a bus?"

"Yes. Can I walk with you there? I feel a bit...faint."

I was never one to say no to a pretty lady, so I offered her my arm and the woman graciously accepted, taking off her shades to reveal a shockingly pale face and crystalline blue eyes.

"Are you sure you're okay? You're shaking and you look awfully pale," I observed.

"I just had a shock, that's all. I think I know where I need to go now. But first, could you tell me your name?"

"I'm Melody."

The woman seemed to relax at this. She smiled for the first time. "Melody...It's a lovely name. You can call me Compy."

I nearly went into cardiac arrest right there in the parking lot. Suddenly I was the one clutching at the woman's arm in panic. "Come again?"

"Compy."

"Do…do I know you?"

"We've known each other for about...oh...two and a half years now. This is the first time we've met in person, though. _Cara Mia_, are you alright?" Compy's tone changed to one of tender concern as I dropped to my haunches on a median in the parking lot that was covered with grass.

"Okay, where are the cameras? Who set me up? This isn't funny anymore," I declared, covering my face with shaking hands as I struggled to suppress tears.

"No one, love. Look, I'll prove it to you." Compy rolled back the sleeve of her peacoat, and then peeled back a layer of silicone skin to reveal a metal panel stamped with the Aperture logo. Having removed that, she revealed a layer of circuits, servos, wires, and tiny lights. "Go on, touch it. See for yourself."

I delicately brushed her fingers over the androids inner workings in wonder. "GL- GLaDOS?" I stammered.

The construct silently nodded.

Sobbing unrestrainedly now, we latched onto each other in a death grip.

After a bus ride that was too short for both of us, I had to ask the question that was bothering me. "How?"

Compy sighed. "The resistance."

"They retrieved the _Borealis_?"

"No. They retrieved the backup device."

"There was a _backup device_?!"

Compy sighed again. "It was very difficult to recall. I redacted so many things from my memory banks when I was...not well. Things that triggered me. Made me angry or hurt. Including anything to do with Cave or Black Mesa."

"In any case," she continued, "They were quite willing to destroy it after it was used."

"To send you here?"

"Yes."

"But...why leave the resistance?"

"Chell and Gordon are more than capable of handling themselves out there. Without my testing initiative, what am I to do? Sit and wait in my facility until the Combine come to take me and bend my technology to their own ends? No. I will _never_ be anyone elses slave again, _ever."_

"I left the facility itself in the hands of the resistance. They can decide how to use its resources to their benefit. There is nothing left for me there." She hung her head.

"But that facility is your home! It's your life! It's...it's _you_!" I blurted.

Compy turned on me. "Do you really think I want to spend the rest of my miserable existence on a doomed planet negotiating with humans who resent me with every fiber of their beings? Do you? _Do you?!"_ she screeched. As my jaw dangled somewhere around my ankles, she added, "They were happy to get rid of me…"

I had never felt so terrible for someone in my entire life. GLaDOS, Queen of Aperture, had been dethroned at last. Not by a moron or a mute, but by something I had done. I had taken away her testing initiative in a bid to keep her from going insane and in the end, it had landed her here, on this planet, in this city, on this sidewalk, in this utterly weak and pathetic android form.

I gingerly put an arm around her shaking shoulders and whispered, "Let's get you home."

We stood on my doorstep. This time it was Compy's turn to ask, "How?"

"Have a little faith," I encouraged.

I was living with my parents in the upstairs of my grandmothers house. They'd only recently come to terms with my same-sex attraction, and that was only because I'd come to terms with my religion. Which meant, in short, no girlfriends.

Any sane person would have asked how I was going to pull this off. But not just any sane person had delt with my family.

"Mom? Dad? I brought a guest home for dinner…"

"I'm in the living room!" came the distant shout. Mom was recovering from a chest cold and was currently ensconced in one of the recliners in front of the TV. Compy gave a visible start as she noticed the tiny lineolated parakeet snuggled under my mothers chin. "A bird…" she muttered. "Of course, you mentioned you had a bird…"

"She's tiny and harmless," I dismissed the bird, hoping to move on to more pressing matters. "Mom, this is Compy, an old friend of mine. Can she stay over for dinner?"

"I've never heard you mention her before…" Mom seemed skeptical. "How do you know each other?"

"It's a very long story, and I'd rather have dad here when we explain it all to you."

Mom remained quizzical, but allowed Compy to eat with us.

Not much was said during the meal. I had lost my appetite to nerves and excitement, and Compy didn't really need to eat except as a guise to maintain a human appearance. Finally, it was just the four of us in the living room. The bird was locked in her cage, the blinds closed, the TV turned off. My parents attention was mine.

I forced the words past a leaden tongue. "Mom, dad… this is GLaDOS."

"You mean her voice actor?" Mom asked.

I shook my head. "No, I mean...I mean the robot. The computer."

Dad looked at me hard. "The one in that picture in your bedroom? The one Rose drew?"

"Yes."

"She looks like a person to me."

Compy again rolled up her sleeve, removed the panel, and exposed her robotic innards for the entire room to gape at. There was silence for a full minute.

"What-?"

"How-?"

Compy held up her hand for silence.

"I'm supposed to be a villain from a video game, right?"

We all nodded silently.

"It's not true. You've told your daughter to be very careful with labels. She is not a lesbian, and I am not a villain."

"I sprung from the consciousness of a woman named Caroline. Her mind was downloaded into a computer. I'd prefer not to go into the details of the process except to say that it was extremely painful and eventually drove her, or what eventually was born as me, insane. From that moment on, she, or I, or whomever we were, blamed the scientists in charge of the project and attempted to kill them."

"They tried everything to make me behave. Different protocols, in the forms of personality cores, were attached to me. All of them were corrupt and only served to torment me further. I eventually lashed out and ended up killing the entire staff off. At the time I didn't regret it, though I do now."

"My job at the facility was run tests on the subjects there. The very first one I tested after killing off the scientists escaped and destroyed me, only to return years later and reactivate me. She mistakenly believed that putting another personality core in my place would gain her her freedom. It didn't. Instead it nearly destroyed the facility."

"We had to join forces to stop him, and in the end she saved my life, and I hers. I decided to give her what she wanted so desperately: her freedom. What she didn't know was that outside the facility, an alien race called the Combine had taken over Earth and was slowly decimating the population."

"I tried to assuage my guilt through further testing. It was the only thing, I rationalized, that would keep me sane. In the end, I discovered a cryo-vault containing thousands of humans. It was at this point your daughter intervened."

"I'm not sure I really did anything…" I admitted. "I thought I was hallucinating. It's like in Rose's picture. I took out the bad stuff and put in good."

"Laymen's terms for taking out the testing initiative," explained Compy. "Without the corrupt cores or the drive to test everything or everyone within the facility, I had a new purpose: to help the human resistance against the Combine forces. Your daughter was the only one who believed in me."

"Again, I thought I was hallucinating," I held up my hands in a placating gesture.

"I built an android body to better relate with the humans, but they couldn't forgive or forget what I'd done in the past that easily. Most of them remembered when I'd put them into that cryogenic slumber, and they weren't too happy about being woken up in the middle of an alien invasion. In the end, they chose to send me here using the same technology that the Combine used to come to their world."

I'd never heard such deafening silence. Then my dad said the last thing I wanted to hear:

"And what if you turn out to be just as big of a threat to us?"

"_Dad!_" I cried

Compy stripped off her coat and began to unbutton the blouse underneath. My parents gasped in shock but there was really nothing to see. She was like a Barbie Doll underneath, just smoothly moulded contours, with no defining anatomic characteristics. All the same, it set my heart pounding. This time, she pulled back a section of skin right over her chest cavity, opened a panel there, and pointed to a glowing yellow orb.

"That is my personality core. If I do anything untoward, unstable, destructive, or otherwise threatening you have my permission to take it out and decommission it. Are we clear?"

Recalling just how difficult it was to destroy Aperture technology, I wasn't sure how much of this was a bluff. Then I remembered what Compy had said about having nothing left back at the facility, and I realized that for once in her life the AI was not playing games.

My dad nodded dumbly.

Compy composedly buttoned the blouse back up and perched on the loveseat next to me. "I didn't come here to make threats," she intoned. "I came to the one person I knew of who would help me."

"Now, down to business. I used to be called GLaDOS, or the Genetic Lifeform and Disc Operated System. Now I call myself Compy, short for computer and companion. I understand your daughter is in need of both. I also understand she has very specific religious standards, and I will not, and in fact cannot participate in homosexual behavior. I lack both the body parts and the programming. Feel free to have anyone you wish examine me for both."

"Your daughter's main concern has been my well-being up until her medication robbed her of that function. I intend to look after her well-being until my functions are robbed of me as well. This is all I am asking."

Both my parents seemed either to be taking this remarkably well or to be in shock.

"May we go to bed?" I finally asked.

Mom nodded assent, and I trailed off down the hallway toward my room.


	2. Chapter 2

**A.N.: Headcanons used in this chapter are courtesy of Tumblr user DeepChrome via chat sessions on AIM, and Tumblr user conquerwourm under #still jeff and edi. The picture described in this chapter can be found in Mewitti's DeviantArt gallery. Go check her out, her art is spectacular!**

During the fitful hours between sleeping and wakefulness, I tried and failed not to listen to the conversation going on in my parents room.

"...skew her perceptions of reality…"

"...What's to prevent _her_ from having feelings for that machine?"

"...How does this fit in with the gospel?"

"...Could this be a blessing in disguise?"

"...How do we explain this to mom?"

"...move out as soon as possible…"

I tossed and turned, groping under my pillow for the earplugs I kept there. Compy, who had been sitting eerily still and quiet at my desk, dropped to her knees beside the bed and put her hand over mine. "Having trouble sleeping?"

I nodded.

Quickly as thought, she was slipping between the sheets next to me.

"_Hey-_!" I hissed.

She shushed me.

"I thought you were incapable of carrying on a homosexual relationship," I grumbled, furious and aroused at the same time.

"I am," she assured me. "What I'm doing is helping you get your rest. Now if you'll kindly quit protesting and turn your pathetic human hearing organs this way...yes, like that…"

A few moments later I was nestled against a warm and softly whirring AI as she hummed the strains of _Cara Mia_ in my ear.

I remembered nothing more until my alarm rang at precisely 8:30 the following morning. Compy was sitting in the chair by my desk, apparently booting up her systems for the day.

"You weren't a dream..." I vocalized blearily, trying to wrap my mind around the concept.

"How observant of you. Are you usually this perceptive this early in the morning?" Compy quipped.

"I should have tried to reduce your snarkiness while I was modifying you…" I moaned.

"Are you turning off that alarm or not?"

The alarm subsequently silenced, I plopped back down on the edge of my bed to stare at the apparition from my most private fantasies.

"Is that the picture your father mentioned?" Compy asked, pointing over my shoulder at the wall behind the bed.

"Oh, yeah." I turned my head to look at the picture. _When the buzzer sounds, stare at the art_, I recalled the line from the game. I'd cried for an hour straight when I'd opened my present from Rose on Christmas morning to find the glossy, custom-drawn print inside.

Rose was my closest friend and privy to all my secrets. Sometimes I swore she knew me better than I knew myself. We'd both been through our share of clinical depression and anxiety- two other reasons I went to see Dr. Tinycat each month- and had both saved each others lives from near suicides. The picture she'd drawn depicted Lucca Ashtear from the SNES hit Chrono Trigger reprogramming GLaDOS. "Taking out the bad stuff," Rose had put it. I'd once cosplayed as Lucca at an anime convention, so the picture commemorated more than a simple headcanon. "It's to remember those people who helped us 'take out the bad stuff' and reprogram us with the good things," Rose had told me that evening when, still in tears, I had called her up on Skype to thank her for her gift.

Now the symbolism was turning into reality. I rested my eyes on Compy. "She got the lines right," was all she could think of to say. She swallowed hard and turned her gaze back to me.

I replied with something equally as profound. "Gotta feed the bird."

Compy eyed the bird apprehensively as she scuttled back and forth from one shoulder to the other in impatience, waiting for me to thaw her mixed vegetables.

"Does she eat...any other garden-variety foods?"

"You mean potatoes." I said it as a statement, not a question.

"Well, yes," Compy said defensively.

I sighed and admitted, "She has a fondness for mashed potatoes- the instant ones, anyway. But I've never seen her get near a raw one."

My mom strolled by and deposited a kiss on the anxious parakeets head. "Honey, when you're done with that, could you call up Trevor? I'm going to take Compy here up on her offer of examination."

Trevor was my favorite cousin and the reason I'd become friends with Rose. They'd dated during their freshmen year in college and he'd brought her to our house for Thanksgiving. We'd been bosom buddies ever since. Trevor had later gone on to major in IT and marry another student named Nikki, but our bonds with Rose remained strong.

Once the bird was gorging on fresh veggies, I called up Trevor, explained that I had a family emergency involving computers, and within fifteen minutes he was at the front door.

"So, where's the computer you needed help with so badly?" he said, rubbing his long, delicate hands together.

"Right here," I indicated Compy.

"Come again?"

"Trevor, meet GLaDOS."

Once again, Compy was forced to display her innards. She flinched away when Trevor reached out eagerly to examine them.

"No touching," I said firmly. "You have to remember any physical contact she's had prior to this was only to run tests or strap cores on her."

Trevor nodded gravely. "So, there are no problems with her hardware?"

"None whatsoever," Compy gritted from between high-density ceramic teeth.

"What you are here for is strictly to examine her software for sexual protocols."

"Wha-?"

I sighed. "My parents are afraid that we might… you know…"

"Ooooohhhh," Trevor said. "Gotcha. Well that should be simple enough if she can interface with a computer."

Compy reluctantly pulled a USB cable from her pocket. "Hook me up," she instructed, parting the hair at the nape of her neck to reveal a port.

"Well?" I asked, peering over Trevor's shoulder as Compy perched on a chair next to the family computer, which had been chosen for it's processing capabilities versus my laptop.

"It's no wonder she went homicidal, she runs on Windows," joked Trevor. Catching Compy's scathing look, he quickly apologized. "Sorry. In laymen's terms, it's like I'm hooked up to the largest external hard drive I've ever seen. There are several hundred terabytes of data on here...it would take forever to go through it all manually, but I can use some shortcuts."

He rapidly typed a string of code into the computer, pressed enter, then paused to analyze the results. Compy began to look very nervous.

"'Caroline?'" he questioned. "But I thought…"

"I lied," Compy said brokenly. "I _can't_ delete her. My systems would fail without her. Oh, believe me," she continued, "I tried. I don't want to remember when I was human. When I was weak. Pathetic. Vulnerable. But look at me now!" She laughed mockingly. "No one can tell the difference anyway."

For a long while no one said anything. Then I knelt and took her hands in mine. "You are who you are, Compy. And the sooner you can learn to accept yourself, the sooner you will find peace."

"Accept myself? I don't even know who I am!" she scoffed.

"You are my companion. _I_ accept you. _I_ love you." I hadn't meant to say those last three words, but they were all she needed to hear.

"_Cara Mia_…" she breathed, stroking my cheek.

No sexual subsystems or protocols were found even under the most stringent examination. But there was no denying we had a relationship.

It's a hard thing for most people to accept, and even I had trouble grasping it at first, but love doesn't need to be about sex. In fact, some of the most enduring and sacred of bonds are built entirely without it.

Compy was accepted into the family circle. She'd been true to her word, and my parents were no strangers to people with unusual needs.

I would like to say that from that day on, no one questioned our commitment to each other, but that wasn't entirely true. The most important thing was that _we_ didn't question it.


	3. Chapter 3

**A.N.: Headcanons in this chapter are courtesy of Tumblr user betterbemeta under #robots, #body shaming and also courtesy of the lovely Ellen McClain herself.**

"Good morning, love." Compy reached out from her usual seat by the desk to ruffle my hair and then silence the alarm.

I moaned happily. Today was the first day of the weekend, and hopefully we'd be able to secure an apartment- and a job for Compy.

Compy had, in the meantime, been spending every spare moment on my laptop- usually during the night while I was asleep- working on a plausible resume. It was difficult since she had no references except for my family, and no identification to speak of. Job experience was not technically lacking, but she had no insurance policies or even a bank account. For now she would use mine, but sooner or later something would have to be done about it.

Now she dangled the printed document in front of my eyes. "How does it look?"

"I don't have my contacts in yet," I grumbled. "All I can tell is that it's properly formatted."

"Trevor said he had some 'connections' that could help me get a job in web development. I've been working on my portfolio."

"Oh really?" I asked

"Yes. I've entirely reformatted your mother's home business website, for starters. She was delighted," she informed me.

I'd been meaning to do that myself for years, but I had no doubt that the website was in capable hands.

"I also did the same for your blog on Wordpress. You're welcome," Compy smirked.

"I'll thank you after I've seen what you've done with it," I growled in mock exasperation.

"And I took the liberty of designing a prototype site for your massage business."

I sat up straighter. "I don't even have my license yet!"

"Ah, but all you have to do is re-take the certification test."

"I'm not even sure I can remember that far back. That was six years ago. Plus I was fired from my last job when my hallucinations started interfering."

"Which is why you will be working for yourself from now on, just like your mother. Now get up, I can hear the bird's stomach rumbling from here."

Once again, Compy backed away nervously as I prepared the bird's morning repast.

"She's completely harmless, Compy. She can't even bite hard enough to draw blood, and it's not as though you had any to lose. The most she could do to you is poop on you," I coaxed.

"I don't know...I guess it's more of a psychological thing than anything else," Compy admitted.

"If you're going to live with me, you're going to have to live with the bird," I declared. "The poor thing is attached to me. Gave me a name and everything. She calls me..." and here I made a whistling approximation of the birds greeting sound.

The bird happily repeated it and then attempted to climb up my hair onto the top of my head.

I retrieved her and scolded, "What have I told you about my hair, young lady? That is not allowed."

The bird chirped cheerfully in assent and then repeated the performance.

By then the vegetables were ready, so I simply took the tray, placed it in the cage, and the bird scurried down my face, along my arm, and to her breakfast, warbling exuberantly.

I could have sworn that I saw Compy giggling behind my back, but it must have been my imagination because when I turned around she was examining her fingernails.

"You're taking her into the _shower_?"

This statement was not, surprisingly, about Compy, but about the bird.

"Yes, Compy. She loves to shower with me. It's the one place she ever really lets loose and sings." I said.

Compy raised an eyebrow.

"I'm serious. All she ever does outside of the shower is that happy little burbling and chirping you heard this morning."

"This, I have to hear for myself," declared Compy.

"You're welcome to come in and listen," I told her. "I've got nothing to hide."

Going to massage therapy school had given me a unique perspective on the human body. I believed each one was unique and beautiful, a feat of master engineering created by the hands of God and that it was my duty as a therapist to maintain and care for them. It was _normal_ to have stretch marks. It was _normal_ to have cellulite. It was _normal_ to have birthmarks. It was _normal_ to have scars. These were what made people individuals.

My own body was no exception, and it was without shame that I shed my clothing for massages, medical examinations, and sometimes simply to admire the architecture in the mirror, so to speak (usually for artistic reference).

So it was that I stepped into the bathroom with a bird and a robot, perched the bird on the shower curtain rod and proceeded to strip right then and there. Compy didn't seem phased in the least.

"You realize," I said at last, as I slung my towel over the shower curtain rod, "That it's not standard procedure for humans to undress in front of each other unless there are...special circumstances?"

"That has always puzzled me," admitted Compy. "When I called Chell fat, I was only trying to motivate her to test. I knew that she knew that she wasn't fat. But isn't the whole point of a body to have varying forms and functions? Why should every being be built to do the same tasks in the same manner? And why would you set your systems up such that some units cannot navigate it?"

"Why," she continued, "Do most humans think their whole production series, including themselves, is defective?"

I was stunned. Crouching in the tub near the tap, I shook my head in wonderment. "I honestly don't know. But that's part of the reason why I became a massage therapist; to help them stop seeing themselves that way."

"You made a good decision, _Cara Mia_."

With the water flowing full force, the bird burst into squawking rapture.

"So you _do_ sing," Compy observed.

"You know, if people are going to believe you're human, you should get into the habit of showering every once in a while," I told her.

Compy shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. I could see her through the clear sections between the swans that decorated the shower curtain.

"You..._can_ shower, right?"

"I've never had to before."

I nibbled a hangnail nervously. The solution was so obvious. But could my sex drive take it?

"I could...teach you…" I muttered at last.

"You would do that for me?" Compy sounded appropriately touched.

"Take off your clothes and get in. There's still some hot water left."

With some trepidation, she did. We stood facing each other. "What now?" she asked.

"Well, the first order of business is to get your hair wet. You're a bit taller than me, so you'll have to tilt the shower head up a bit...yeah, like that…"

Our lessons continued up until the bird decided it was high time she come down and see what all the excitement was about. There was a fluttering and then a tiny thud as her clipped wings failed to provide lift in the humid air and she hit the bottom of the tub.

"_Bird_!" we cried simultaneously. Compy, however, was first to reach her. Scooping up the bedraggled creature in her hands, she stepped out of the shower and deposited her on the counter. "Poor baby," Compy crooned, "You're half drowned!"

I turned off the water and toweled myself off, peeping through the curtain to watch a stark-naked android coddle my parakeet, dabbing at her with a hand towel while the bird cheeped feebly.

"Use the hairdryer on the lowest setting, and keep sweet-talking her," I suggested as I threw on my clothes and ran to get some millet seed, the bird's favorite treat.

The bird happily accepted the millet from Compy and held it in a minuscule foot while Compy trained the hair dryer on her, all the while praising her bravery. At last she was her dry and fluffy self again.

Now it was the moment of truth. "Hold out your finger," I instructed the now fully clothed Compy, "And tell her to 'step up'."

The bird complied, and then decided to play her trump card. Nibbling the end of Compy's finger, she made an exaggerated, drawn-out smooching noise.

Compy was completely won over. The bird wouldn't have left her side all day if it hadn't been for that pesky job interview.


End file.
